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I'd give them another version or two to open the kimono. If there's anything good under the hood we can run it up the flagpole and see how it flies.
You never know, they may keep drip-feeding new stuff into Make to keep whetting the appetite of potential new Pro users...wouldn't want to wrongside the demographic.
Where the heck did I put that fork? 
I'm not sure why you have so much triangulation in that design. Surely the front and back faces are a flat plane?
On the face of it, yes, it is far more work than is needed. Can you post the file; and I'll give it a shot. Do you want the in-fill to be coplanar with the front or back face...or halfway through the thickness of the design.
In the early days of SketchUp, before there were any renderers at all, one method I used for depicting a more ambient light in an interior was to go to the Shadows control (now part of the trays setup) and reverse the position of the sliders. Move the Light one way down and the Dark one up. As long as you don't slide them clear to the end (which is effectively the same as turning shadows off) you'll still have shadows, but they'll be far more muted.
Learning to use Mesh Wrapper efficiently will pay dividends if you deal with much hi-poly content. It will make for a much neater and more editable model than a savage poly-reduction.
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/meshwrapper-tool
As juju say, there's most likely something left behind in that far empty corner. It might not even be hidden, it might be a tiny, almost invisible line stub. Just open the group, sweep Select from left to right from the lounger to clear over that area (with Hidden Geometry on, just in case it's hidden) and hit Delete...then see if the bounding box snaps closer to the lounger.
We 'll probably need as many as possible...the more the better. I believe the time frame for the whole job is from any time now till year's end. There's work for multiple people...or one workaholic with gambling debts.
Hi all,
I'm throwing this out there to see who bites. Anyone interested can PM me.
There is the distinct possibility that we might might have a ton of work on offer...which pays reasonably well and needs to be done over the course of the next few months.
The job entails producing image maps for many iconic buildings. These atlases (as they are being termed) are in the form of a single, square image that covers the entire shell of the building; and it has to use that area as economically as possible. The mesh itself is just a very simple massing model, so all the detail is being handled by the image.
I apologise for any vagueness, but we are under a heavy NDA; and in any case, negotiations are still incomplete. It's looking like the pay rate will be in the region of about $20/hr as each job may take about 10hrs to complete and is somewhere in the region of $200. It's possible that a second, mask image will need to be produced to allow for window illumination after dark, but this shouldn't take very long. There are hundreds of building to do.
Rather unusually, the images are not to be produced in Photoshop, but as scaleable vectors. This will mean either proficiency in Illustrator or Inkscape (which is free...check it out). Personally I prefer Corel, but that turned out to be no good as it exported gradient fills as non-scaleable bitmaps to SVG (the required format; and Inkscape's native format)...and gradient fills are required to suggest the soft shadows around protrusions/extrusions.
To give you an idea of what is required, I attach an SVG I made a while ago of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. This was produced in Inkscape while effectively learning it on the job after I had to abandon Corel. All images would need to conform to this kind of NPR style. Obviously, any kind of weathering or general grunge is not going to be required in a vector drawing. I've had to zip the SVG as it's not an allowed attachment. It should display in IE, if downloaded, and can be zoomed using Ctrl + -. I hope the png version displays.
So...if you know your way around a vector drawing program, are comfortable with concepts behind UV mapping, think you can handle something like the attached file; and want to earn some extra cash, then let me know.
You can follow the link I posted earlier, but you can also find it archived at sketch3d.com
http://web.archive.org/web/20040604083405/http://www.sketch3d.com/
BTW, although the images don't seem to have saved, most of the links to the uploaded skp files on the old forum seem to be still live. Just wait for the redirect.
Quite apart from any graphical effects of styles, you can often get a more interior-like effect by reversing the sliders in the shadows dialog...slide the Light down and the Dark up. You'll get a more ambient effect, even with shadows still turned on.
The UI itself has hardly changed at all, visually. It has changed in the way you can actually organise the icons and palettes...it's much more customisable now. But if you arrange them in V2016 the way you see them in the tutorials for V7 you should be good to go.
Yes you can jump back and forth to your heart's content. The file format itself hasn't changed at all since V7.
There used to be a download site for every version back to about V3, but I think it was on the Google server, so it's probably gone now. I have a bookmark somewhere...just not on this laptop. If I find it and it still works, I'll post it. I would advise against downloading older versions from 3rd part websites. They'll possibly be virus infected.
Just use the current version of Make. As with Q.1 you'll still be able to make sense of the tutorials if you set up your workspace to match.
The major difference between the Pro and free versions is that you can't import/export to CAD files as easily. Also, the free version will not enable you to make Dynamic Components...just use them. There are also one or two extensions (like Solid Tools) that aren't available in the free version.
I think playing around with the AA settings is the way to go. It seems to vary from system to system. I've never really bothered with AA on any of my machines for the last few years, as the jaggies just didn't seem to be a problem. Just for the heck of it, I turned the AA setting up on one system....and the face-selection stipple pretty much disappeared altogether. I could still see selected edges, but not faces.
I don't have much use for this myself, but to anyone dealing with geodesic structures it looks the biz. It seems quite new...Donateware.
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/oaktree/geodesica/
Some YouTube vids
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzsp1DWUkWjK312s7JKdO6g/feed
Since we're getting all nostalgic and bleary eyed...
http://web.archive.org/web/20030817021557/http://www.sketchup.com/forum/list.php?f=4
A few recognisable names here.
Well gents, I admit that the coding does look a little primitive, but what can I say? It's not my coding...and it works for me in Pro 2016 v16.1.1449. and the skp is up there to prove it (although I think I saved it in SU 2015 for non-upgraders) I notice that no one has actually downloaded the end result yet.
Thanks for improving it TIG. Do you think you could throw in some parametrics too? (BTW, I see that guy on the Trimble forum is still at it. I've never come across anyone so unwilling to admit a mistake)
It doesn't seem to make any difference. The polyhedron is created whether the statements are left in French accented or translated to English.
As the title says...a handy little Windows program that will generate a bewildering number of regular polyhedra. If you're after a specific one, you may have to Google then enter its Wythoff symbol.
It will output either a pdf pattern to make a paper model....or amazingly...export a Ruby script that you can enter into the Console to generate the geometry in SU.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gsolaar/
Pasting the Ruby script into the Console will place a gsolaar menu item for that particular polyhedron at the bottom of the Extensions menu.
For what it's worth, I've often noticed that a skp file is often far more than the sum of its parts.
In other words, you can purge and forcibly delete all materials from a file, so that it's just pure geometry, then check the size of that geometry file and add it to the total file size of all the image files contained in the original skp.
You occasionally get a file that is quite ludicrously larger than that sum total. From what I can tell from all my work with organic shapes, SU's very quirky UV mapping system devotes a heck of a lot of data to mapping anything that isn't just the run-of-the-mill bricks on a wall/tiles on a floor.
I'm not aware of any such "auditing" plugin for materials. You can, however export any suspect images from the Materials palette, resample them smaller in PShop or whatever, then import them back in...again using the Edit function in the Materials palette.
You can also edit the materials in the skp directly without any import/export. You just need to tell SU what Image Processor to use in Preferences > Applications. Both functions can be accessed by r-clicking the required swatch in the In Model tab.
If I'm not mistaken, someone wrote a script (TIG?) to mass-export materials from a file to a folder.
Holy Cow! For a beginner, you really like jumping in the deep end, don't you? Pun intended.
Asymmetric deformation and a skewed base.
Okay, what you need to do, if you haven't got them already is to install The two plugins Sketchy FFD (Freeform Deformation) and Joint Push/Pull.
Until you've done that you won't even be able to see parts of the skp below (like the control points of FFD)
After you've done that, open the file below and click through the scenes tabs at the top. They will baby walk you through the entire process. Until you've learnt a little about those two plugins, some of the instructions will still be gibberish.
FFD is accessed via a right-click context menu on the selected Group. JPP has its own tool-bar.
I hope this helps.
I'm sure it can be done in Blender, but I have no experience of that. You might also try out Sculptris. That looks pretty useful for organic modelling. It's going to be pretty high-poly though.
http://pixologic.com/sculptris/
More useful might be the free open-source subdivision modeller Wings3D
http://www.wings3d.com/
As for SketchUp, I can't think of any free smoothing plugin to get that final smooth effect, but Joint Push Pull is free/donate. To subdivide the mesh, it is possible to use the free Fractal Erode plugin with iterations set to 1 and the pointyness set to 0